- White Flight, as explained by Howard Zinn. The "Valley" of LA exists because of school integration and the fact that privileged white folx didn't want their babies going to school with those horrible brown and black kids, thus creating a geographically as well as economically divided metroplex.

- the Street Car Conspiracy, as explained by nearly everyone. LA is a spread out heinous shithole because Firestone, General Motors, Standard Oil and Mack all worked hand-in-hand behind the scenes to annihilate public transit in the areas that needed it most.

Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.

- Frank Lloyd Wright

It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself. Nathaniel West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust, and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are.